Reading this book felt like following the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of a smart, but uninteresting person. The plot sounded promising. After her husband leaves her poet Mia cracks, spends a year recovering in a psychiatric hospital, and finally moves back to Iowa to live near her aging mother. Yet, there's something about this book that simply didn't connect with me. At the end of the book I felt as if nothing had happened. And yet, so much happens in this book, but events are subsumed by Mia's musing which are simply not very interesting. Mia would be fodder for people who think that academics aren't very interesting (and I'm an academic- I know that some of us are interesting!) This is a short book, but it took me some time to get through, as I could only handle small bits at a time.
Siri Hustvedt, The Summer without Men (Picador, 2011) ISBN: 0312570600